Fraud and deception among society’s heroes draw attention to contradictions and inconsistencies in its value systems. Because American culture applauds entrepreneurship, independence, and ambition, for example, scientists have been encouraged to develop independent imaginations and innovative research, to engage in intense competition, to strive for success. Ironically, Americans also want their whitecoated heroes to be humble and generous in success, to share credit where credit is due, not to steal credit falsely. The discovery that a scientist has calmly and rationally cheated, lied, and deceived his colleagues and the public contradicts the common image of how scientists should act. It also creates doubt about the reliability of scientific advice—a disturbing uncertainty in a world where that advice is so pervasive.

        —Marcel C. LaFollette, “The Politics of Scientific Fraud,” September 1993

NATIONALISM

One of the things that has blurred the bitter, present-day realties of French society and politics has been the stupid habit of calling Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front a “right-wing” party. In strict fact, the National Front, which is now in numerical terms France’s leading workers’ party, is no more a “right-wing” party than was Adolf Hitler’s NSDAP—the National-Sozialistische-Deutsche-Arbeiter-Partei—which to the very end of the Third Reich proudly advertised itself as both a “socialist” and a “workers’ party” in order to emphasize its popularity with the laboring masses of Germany. The reason why French working men and women have been abandoning the traditional parties of the so-called “left” and flocking to the National Front in droves is because they are fed up with the shopworn rhetoric of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which has no relevance today to the conditions of everyday life in their once-tranquil suburbs.

        —from Curtis Gate, “The Revolt of the French Masses: The Smoldering Fires of Immigration,” July 1997

Patriotism grows from a sense of belonging to a particular country; it is confident rather than self-conscious; it is essentially defensive. Nationalism is self-conscious rather than confident; it is aggressive, and suspicious of all other people within the same nation who do not seem to agree with some of the popular nationalist ideology. Patriotism is traditionalist; nationalism is ideological. Patriotism is rooted to the land; nationalism to the mythical image of a people, of a community that so often is not a real community. Patriotism is not a substitute for religion, where as nationalism often is. It may fill the emotional needs of insufficiently rooted people. It may be combined with hatred— and, as Chesterton said, it is not love (which is always personal and particular) but hatred that may unite otherwise very disparate men and women. Or, as Duff Cooper once put it, “the jingo nationalist is always the first to denounce his fellow country men as traitors.”

—from John Lukacs, “The Patriotic Impulse,” July 1992

By the end of World War II, the federal government had largely succeeded in replacing the various European-American identities with a “universal” American nationalism, and new immigrants were forced to abandon their national identity and native language and sign on to the “American way of life.” Postwar American nationalism—built on democracy, capitalism, the Pledge of Allegiance, hot dogs, baseball, and Rotary—may have been sufficient to drive the Cold War, but it was insufficient to bind the nation or to act as a bulwark against alien cultures. People long for roots, for a sense of belonging. An abstract conception of democracy and capitalism can only displace, not replace, the songs and stories, faith and food, language and kinship that compose a true national culture. By alienating European Americans from their national cultures in the interwar period, the federal government replaced an emerging American national identity with a false nationalism, and undermined our ability to withstand assault from Third World cultures. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, removing the national preference for European immigrants and opening the floodgates to Third World immigration, he signed the death warrant of postwar nationalism. . . .

What can be done? To say that America stands at a crossroads, with one fork leading to Europe and one to a global Third World culture, would be incorrect. America reached that crossroads in the early years of this century, and . . . our rulers chose the fork leading to the Third World. If we desire to revitalize our educational system and to reaffirm America’s status as a European country, we must, like the Prodigal Son, acknowledge our error (and our bankruptcy) and return home. The standard neoconservative “solutions” advanced by Allan Bloom and Bill Bennett—”Great Books,” a national core curriculum, an emphasis on assimilating immigrants—won’t work; these were, in fact, among the tools used to subvert the older educational system and to place us on our current path. . . .

Multiculturalism is a fable, as is any American nationalism that tries to deny or eradicate the European and regional cultures that once made America strong. If America is to have a future as a nation, and not simply as a geographical region, then we must allow Anglo-American culture to bind Northern and Southern, Western and Central and Eastern European communities in the United States in a revitalized American civilization. It is time for the Prodigal Son to grow up, and to return home.

        —from Scott P. Richert, “The Multicultural Lie: The European Roots of American Life,” April 1998

[Donald Warren]: You identify yourself with the intellectual roots of German conservative thought that is quite different from National Socialism . . .

[Jörg Haider]: I think it is very important to have a clear understanding of German and European history on the main question of National Socialism. It contained many different streams of thought. There were socialist streams, and many people were executed for following this commitment. If the New Right had existed at the time of the Third Reich, these intellectuals would have been put in concentration camps, just as were German conservatives. There is a very important difference between a conservative revolution and National Socialism.

        —from Donald Warren, “Letter From Austria, Pt. II: A New European Identity,” October 1992